Market mutton dressed as ÜberLamb: Diagnosing the commodification of self-overcoming

Abstract

Nietzsche invites us to turn our focus to how subjects seek out what is average rather than what is authentically independent. For marketing theory, this means recognising that while the desire for autonomy and self-determination functions as a seductive and collective narrative for consumer culture generally, it inevitably becomes denatured and delimited to what each individual consumer finds to be most convenient, credible, and practical. Using a Nietzschean toolbox, this paper diagnoses a contemporary malaise in the process of ‘commodified self-overcoming’, whereby subjects are fed the mass-mediated fantasy that they can overcome the symbolic similitude of the majority while remaining comfortably part of the social ‘herd’. We discuss this process using three illustrative archetypes: the inhuman ‘BIG Zombie’, the transhuman ‘Cyborg’, and the all-too-human ‘Slacktivist’. These archetypes reveal how the prospect of overcoming the self and all of its human trappings functions as a core fantasy for consumers, albeit one that is paradoxically produced and supplied by market mechanisms that perpetuate a lasting humanism. We explore the notion of ante-humanism and conclude with implications for the nascent tradition of Terminal Marketing.

Introduction

Far from the market-place and fame have the inventors of new values always lived. (Nietzsche, 2005 [1883]: 46)

There is growing recognition of the fundamental limits to market capitalism’s continued ability to sustain viable, contented, and progressive visions for all of society (Ahlberg et al. 2022). Reckoning with these limits confronts us with the reality that there is ‘trouble in paradise’, to use Žižek’s (2014) titular phrase. Despite tremendous advances, consumers do not appear secure, happy, or satisfied under liberalised market capitalist institutions and value systems (Cronin and Fitchett, 2022; Hietanen et al., 2022; Hewer, 2022; Szmigin et al., 2020). Many segments of consumer culture report marginalisation, enduring feelings of precariousness, existential lack, and an anxiety-provoking sense of competition (Lambert, 2019). It is not immediately clear what sources of theory can be used to diagnose these disappointments or the role of marketing therein, although attempts have been made (e.g. Ahlberg et al., 2022; Hoang et al., 2023). Indeed, one of the main obstacles would appear to be that while there are many critical voices capable of analysing the limitations of market capitalism, there are fewer proposals for viable, credible, and thus widely acceptable alternatives.

Importantly, the search for alternatives is no longer the sole preserve of some presumed coalition of the anti-market or, for that matter, anti-marketing left (Cambefort and Pecot, 2017). Many of the popular voices on what we might collectively term the ‘far right’ draw knowingly (or otherwise) on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche for intellectual inspiration when critiquing market-liberal orthodoxies and the limits of consumer culture (Beiner, 2018). Nietzsche has long been co-opted by traditional conservatives, and the theme of Nietzschean proto-fascism remains a subject of uneasy debate in social theory (Williams, 1989). His reinvigorated appeal to rightist reactionary movements is grounded to his radical views about the humanist project, specifically its emphasis on common humanity, pluralistic identity pursuits, and equality – now manifest in market-based freedoms (Cronin and Fitchett, 2021) – and how this nurtures an epidemic of mediocrity and false satisfactions. Nietzsche (1997 [1873–76]: 148) criticises capitalism as ‘a hugely contemptible money economy’, which he attributes, among other things, to ‘a total extermination and uprooting of culture’. For him, hierarchy and domination provide a more sustainable and convincing narrative than egalitarian liberalism and, for the preservation of humanity, we should strive for the greatness of the few rather than the shallowness of comfort for all.

While such rhetoric ensures that Nietzsche remains one of the most dangerous thinkers in philosophy, we must avoid what Beiner (2018: 14) fears to be ‘the unfortunate conclusion that we should just walk away from Nietzsche’ and instead endeavour to read him, he suggests, in ‘ways that make us more conscious of, more reflective about, and more self-critical of the limits of the liberal view of life and hence what defines that view of life’. A Nietzsche-informed reading of our contemporary consumer culture can help us to engage in the ontological denaturalisation called for in ‘terminalist’ or ‘de-romanticist’ consumption studies (Ahlberg et al., 2022; Fitchett and Cronin, 2022). Nietzsche can help us to recognise that the market-based maxims we often take for granted are not inescapable or inevitable historical developments; rather, they are founded on the philosophical and ideological tenets of liberalism and humanism, and thus chart a particular intellectual trajectory that is often tacit in the background of marketing critique.

There is, however, no consensus on how to apply Nietzsche directly to the analysis of contemporary consumer culture. Several diverging interpretations have already been pursued (Brown, 1995; Cronin and Fitchett, 2021; de Oliveira et al., 2019; Fitchett, 2018; Freund, 2015). This ambiguity stems from Nietzsche’s dogged avoidance of commentating singularly or consistently on the divisions and debates around social, political, and economic life. As suggested by one commentator, ‘perhaps Nietzsche’s philosophy is better likened to an intellectual “game” rather than a system’ (Yeritsian, 2020: 210). In this paper, we focus on one of Nietzsche’s most well-known ideas – the Übermensch (Overhuman) and its obverse, the letzer mensch (last human) – to discuss how a critique of liberal-humanist orthodoxy can serve as a useful theoretical device through which we can denaturalise commonly accepted principles in marketing theory and practice, whilst also uncovering the crucial operation of the lures and appeals of consumer culture. The paper has two objectives: (1) to conceptualise global consumer culture as a dialectical space that simultaneously promotes humanistic values and aristocratic ambitions, by promising each of its subjects that they can be superior to the majority, and; (2) to characterise this dialecticism as premised upon markets’ and marketing’s enabling of consumers to perceive of themselves as the Overhuman while remaining at the level of the last human.

In terms of our contributions, Nietzschean critique confronts us with an underlying contradiction about the nature of selfhood in market society. That contradiction, as we will discuss, centres on how a popular desire to overcome the self, with all of its human(ist) trappings, functions as a seductive and collective narrative for consumer culture generally, but is simultaneously negated by each individual subject’s lasting human commitment to remaining a consumer. By limiting efforts to overcome the self to only what each individual finds to be most convenient, credible, and practical, consumer subjects remain forever ensconced in market-coordinated solutions which simply colonise and reconstitute, rather than transcend, their human(ist) baggage.

This conceptual paper is organised into four sections. First, we provide a background to humanism, how it has shaped key assumptions in marketing, and how it contrasts with Nietzschean thinking. Second, we introduce Nietzsche’s Overhuman and the implications that this has for consumer culture. Here, we include a sub-section discussing how marketing has positioned the consumer as Overhuman, despite Nietzschean theory suggesting otherwise. Third, we provide the main part of our argument which maps out three contemporary archetypes of a nebulous last-human-masquerading-as-Overhuman figure in consumer culture; a figure we unpack and conceptualise as ‘ante-humanist’. Fourth, we conclude with the critical implications of ante-humanism and clarify how Nietzschean critique disrupts what Ahlberg et al. (2022: 670) call ‘the old optimistic order’ of marketing theory.

The last(ing) human(ism) of marketing

Humanism, the ideological episteme that sanctifies the liberty, intentionality, and exceptionalism of humans continues to overtly and covertly structure the marketing imagination and its positioning of the consumer subject (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011; Botez et al. 2020; Thompson et al., 2013). Faith in human autonomy and anthropocentric dominion is not simply a matter of theoretical disposition, but is arguably axiomatic to the entire marketing discipline, both in its scholarly and managerial domains (Arnould, 2022). Without the presumed sovereignty of self-reflective, self-serving human agents in the marketing process, the understanding of what drives and influences consumers, how they perceive their experiences, make decisions, and establish preferences becomes less tenable. Humanism has normalised thinking that an object is not a marketable object of consumption unless it can be understood in functional and/or symbolic terms by humans, nor can the human be understood as a subject of consumption without first recognising its voluntaristic will, based on emotions, meaning-making, and the freedoms to choose and seek out self-actualising experiences. Accordingly, humanistic thinking in marketing scholarship has enthused a legacy of research which ‘discursively constructed consumer culture as a kind of symbolic supermarket in which autonomous consumers made selections, chose identities, and extended their core selves through the ownership and use of material goods’ (Thompson et al., 2013: 156).

Humanism shapes, and is shaped by, social and moral regimes that were scaffolded during the Enlightenment and ossified throughout the modern era by a liberal political and economic consensus, to ensure that the universal human subject – and its innate potential for self-determination – is upheld and valued as real, natural, and right (see Wertenbroch et al., 2020). However, commitment to this consensus without reflexivity can engender an acritical desire amongst subjects for equal recognition and the elimination of all conceivable manifestations of unequal recognition, which restricts originality and risks inculcating a repressive mediocrity and complacent sanctimony that Nietzsche calls a ‘slave’ or ‘herd’ morality (Nietzsche, 1998 [1886]). For him, the underpinning values of liberal democratic market societies that centre on the common, universalist category of the ‘human’ and its attached egalitarian levelling impulses are not borne out of some overarching sense of purpose or justice, but emerge simply because any alternative is too burdensome in a world where comfort is the most sane and normative aspiration. To Nietzsche, enforcing not just the recognition but the expectation that everyone participates equally in the world as an ‘individual’ is little more than a product of vanity, conceits, and delusions, a corrosion of social imagination that trivialises genuine distinctiveness, supplanting it with what has been described as an often market-coordinated hegemony of ‘compulsory individuality’ (Cronin, 2000) or ‘generic liberal individualism’ (Hall, 2012).

Humanity, to Nietzsche, is closer to a herd than genuinely independent subjects: ‘No herdsman and one herd! Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse’ (Nietzsche, 2005 [1883]: 16). This is because, for Nietzsche, meaning, purpose, aspiration, and expression are rarely unique, but are often shared, knowingly or otherwise, by many. This dispels the potential for original action or thought: ‘My idea is, as you see, that consciousness does not really belong to a man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature’ (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887]: 299). With his scepticism towards humans’ universal potential to exert true individuality, Nietzsche’s philosophical position is best classifiable as anti-humanist and stands in stark contrast to the humanism of marketing in two key ways. First, Nietzschean anti-humanism criticises the authenticity and neutrality of many of the ‘human’ things marketing scholars presume to be commonly, consciously, and conspicuously leading consumer behaviour, whether selfhood, personal values, or agential freedom. Nietzsche urges us to reevaluate what we think the human is or is responsible for, being wary of how much is actually the effect of generalised social conformity – our ‘taming’ as good members of the herd – and urges us to consider interests that lie beyond humanity: ‘The human is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome it?’ (Nietzsche, 2005 [1883]: 11). Although marketing theory and practice has a long-standing tradition of posthuman theorising (e.g. assemblage approaches, poststructural accounts of unconscious desiring flows), their success remains relatively limited in the face of a prevailing disciplinary preference for consciousness- and human-affirming conceptualisations (Botez et al., 2020; Coffin, 2021). Second, Nietzsche advocates for aristocratic values whereby it is not the many but rather the few who might be capable of achieving difference, transcending social structures and ideals, and whose efforts should be privileged above the entrenched majority. This contrasts with the democratic axioms of marketing practice, where all are treated equally (so long as they can pay), and the liberal-humanist ambitions of much marketing scholarship, which usually critique markets for not being inclusive or egalitarian enough (see Arsel et al., 2022).

Because of his aristocratic values, Nietzsche has been subject to multiple criticisms, including the accusation that his philosophy is especially compatible with those who are committed to an extreme rightist political agenda (Golomb and Wistrich, 2002; Williams, 1989). However, it is important to note that Nietzsche’s philosophy is, as Golomb and Wistrich (2002: 8) point out, ‘fundamentally antithetical to the totalitarian collectivism of both the Right and the Left’. Nietzsche did not emphasise politically centred solidarity projects nor was he interested in collective struggles of any one group over another for political power. What Nietzsche cared about above all was the life-affirming sublimation or mastery over oneself; a project of liberation from all forms of external determination that we might be capable of achieving if only we could break from the herd, reject validation from others, and ultimately set aside a conceitful bad faith existence. Relatedly, Nietzsche’s project of liberation contrasts sharply with fantasies of the emancipatory potential of consumption upheld by marketing practitioners and scholars who point to the market as a competitive venue of spectacle and display wherein power, in the form of cultural and symbolic representation, social codes, and lifestyles, is available to whomever seeks some kind of external affirmation (Thompson et al., 2013).

Instead of universal participation in a society of signification, Nietzsche emphasises the contributions of the few who go against the grain of social convention and external affirmation not out of anger, jealousy, or resentment but simply to push the boundaries of humanity. These few might be interpreted as the non-conformist minority or minorities who courageously challenge the status quo to create for themselves a more just, less homogenous, and less resentful society. Examples of such a liberatory reading of Nietzsche can be found in chapters by Kathryn Pyne Parsons and Tracy Strong in Solomon’s (1973) now classic Nietzsche: A collection of critical essays. Parsons invokes Nietzsche to discuss how women’s rights workers of 19th century Anglo-American societies managed to confer in themselves new values, overcome existing ones and, in doing so, root out and overthrow a slavish morality that imprisoned women within a culturally, socially, and legally subordinate position to men. For Parsons, it was not an equal pursuit by all women to relieve their suffering under a sexist hegemony, as the preponderance of 19th century women did not perceive themselves to be suffering from sexism, rather it was the fiercely independent thinking of the few that challenged ‘a double standard of humanity, one which adversely affected the moral being of both men and women’ (1973: 177). Relatedly, Strong accounts for how a thriving culture was precariously maintained throughout a period of ancient Greek history by the agonistic politics of an enlightened few who championed philosophy, held antipathy towards mere survival, and were concerned with the freedom necessary for a ‘greater’ communal health. Elsewhere, Yeristian (2020) invokes Nietzsche to explore the exceptionalism of an avant-garde and anarchist minority as buttressing against stultifying industrial and militarist nationalism in pre-war Germany, and again in challenging a dull, conformist post-war Europe, as exemplified by the student uprisings in France of May 1968. In a Nietzschean sense, the defence of creativity and self-expression have often been led only by ‘[t]hose few who do retain their expressive and instinctual vitality… in the face of the radical contingency and groundlessness of existence’ (Yeritsian, 2020: 214–215).

‘Those few’ who are exceptional enough to rise above hegemony, petty self-comparison, taken-for-granted standards, and repressive absolutisms feature throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre, but they are crystallised most dramatically in his concept of the Übermensch or “Overhuman”, introduced in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2005 [1883]). Nietzsche’s Overhuman is presented as an experimental figure willing and able to overcome human conceits and illusions, including but not limited to morality, identity, ideology, and materialism; the Overhuman imagines a new kind of agent that celebrates and embodies all of the qualities and elements of “the best or most well-lived life” (Firestone 2017: 378). In contrast, those who populate the herd of mediocrity are conceptualised as “last humans”: dystopic figures who avoid challenge and conflict, buy into all human conceits and illusions, preferring to stay perpetually in their comfort zones: ‘What they are trying with all their strength to achieve is a common green pasture of happiness for the herd, with safety, security, comfort, ease of life for everyone’ (Nietzsche, 1998 [1886]: 41).

One of the main comforting zones for the herd is the market, which Nietzsche disdains (as shown epigraphically). Nietzsche (2005 [1883]: 16), through the prophet Zarathustra, ponders how when the choice of the Overhuman or last human is put to the average person in the marketplace, they will openly and boldly embrace the latter: ‘“Give us this last human, O Zarathustra”—so they cried—“Turn us into these last humans! Then you can have the Overhuman!”’. In their desire to be ‘turned into’ the last humans, consumers can be understood to have consigned themselves willingly to captivity within an economy of commodified spectacles. Despite claims to the contrary, consumer culture offers few opportunities for genuine and meaningful creativity or self-expression. The expression of selfhood is restricted to a limited selection of pre-determined and normative offerings targeted and positioned to the central tendencies of constructed market segments.

For the purposes of this paper, it is important to emphasise the latent parallel between last humans and the lasting humanism that they embody and help to perpetuate. It is in this epistemic but also ontological context that Nietzschean ideas may be incisive, if not intellectually incendiary. These ideas invite us to ask: what kind of relations exist today between the last(ing) human(ism) of consumers and the aristocratic ideals embodied by the Overhuman? And to what extent does the contemporary market influence and mediate these relations?

Defining the Overhuman

Although presented as the solution to the problem of humanism, the precise content of Nietzsche’s nebulous model of the Overhuman is never given. Nevertheless, a close reading of Nietzsche’s wider canon can help to map out the concept’s major parameters. As shown by Firestone’s (2017) detailed review of the Overhuman, ten primary attributes recur throughout Nietzsche’s works: (1) Self-determination, (2) Creativity, (3) Becoming, (4) Overcoming, (5) Discontent, (6) Flexibility, (7) Self-mastery, (8) Self-confidence, (9) Cheerfulness, and (10) Courage.

Self-determination, self-mastery, self-confidence, and courage combine to denote the capacity of the few to willingly question and potentially reject popular, moral, or common-sense attitudes and values. Unlike humanism, which presumes and valorises all human subjects’ capacity for autonomy, Nietzschean philosophy asserts that it is only through the critical non-conformist thinking and fiercely independent behaviour of the few that genuinely autonomous action can be observed. The Overhuman ‘reveres the power in himself, and also his power over himself’ (Nietzsche, 1998 [1886]: 154) and by accepting the traumatic truth that there are no universal freedoms, one must be prepared to reappraise one’s ability and deservedness to be independent and fight against the herd morality of others. The Overhuman is also a creative figure in that one must ultimately be prepared to find meaning and purpose for one’s life rather than relying on others to provide it. This might be taken to mean a willingness to rebuff engaging in the market-coordinated, comparative consumption of popular culture in favour of creating one’s own meaningful lifestyle based on authentic values.

The will to overcome is the most defining quality of the Overhuman. Nietzsche believed that the best-lived life stems from overcoming adversity rather than living in safety and security. As Nietzsche (1998 [1886]: 39) states, ‘Those of us who are destined to be independent and to command must in return set ourselves our own tests’. Instead of shying away from and avoiding challenges and difficulties, hardships are sought out for their life-affirming effects. This is where the famous Nietzschean aphorism ‘what does not kill him makes him stronger’ emerges (Nietzsche, 2007 [1908]: 9). Moreover, overcoming requires embracing discontent as a positive and creative force: ‘What makes one heroic? – Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope’ (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887]: 219). The Overhuman must remain discontented and never be satiated. Nietzsche celebrates exposure to traumas, trials, and uncertainties which enable the Overhuman ‘to enjoy the practice of severity and harshness towards himself’ (1998 [1886]: 154). By understanding that struggle is a stimulant and embracing hardship as a route to hardiness, even happiness, the Overhuman manages to derive a cheerful disposition from the darkest of circumstances.

But how might the human be overcome? Becoming is a crucial concept here. For the Overhuman, becoming is a commitment to ‘continual self-growth… instead of just being’ (Firestone, 2017: 384). This should not be confused with the humanist style of growth promoted by market prospects of exercising entrepreneurial selfhood through conspicuous consumption, the wellness industry, cosmetic surgery, life coaches, and such. Unlike the humanist doctrine that fetishises the individual pursuit of identity projects, Nietzsche suggests that the concept of identity and its achievement through consumption is a delusion that must continually be re-evaluated and even allowed to die if it interferes with living. Nietzschean becoming, then, is a radical process that overlaps with the need to be flexible – whereby everything, including the most fundamental ontological foundations of selfhood, are subject to critique and reconfiguration. As a corollary, Nietzsche rails against universal rules which protect the rights of everyone, including society’s most privileged groups who, even if undeserving of their privilege, are disinclined to surrender their comforts or power. For him, there can be no single or inflexible ‘way’ that everyone should be expected to live by: ‘“This — is just my way: — where is yours?” Thus I answered those who asked of me “the way.” For the way — does not exist!’ (Nietzsche, 2005 [1883]: 169).

Can the consumer ever become the Overhuman?

Based on the parameters laid out in the section above, we can assess the contemporary consuming subject against the ideals of the Overhuman. For some consumer researchers, clear parallels might be drawn between the Overhuman’s discontent, flexibility, self-confidence, and becoming and the insatiable hyper-desirous consumer’s demands for evermore stimulating, improved, updated, and enhanced products, services, and experiences. This is evident in interpretivist consumer cultural approaches centring on the ‘valorization of the autotelic, noninstrumental, esthetic, symbolic, and experiential aspects of consumption’ (Thompson et al., 2013: 156) in which the heroic edification of consumers as creative and autonomous pioneers of life-affirming quests is an explicit feature. Attempts to attribute characteristics of the Overhuman are perhaps most clearly evidenced in Consumer Culture Theory’s earliest ‘Odyssey era’ work, propelled in part by efforts to stake out legitimacy for the then evolving intellectual tradition (see Fitchett et al., 2014). We see this in conceptualisations which equate pedestrian consumerist activities like searching for gifts to give when returning from a trip with the ‘archetypal monomyth of the heroic quest’ (Belk et al., 1989: 19), or human-material interactions like ‘manipulating a new computer system, driving a first car, or successfully negotiating rapids in a new kayak’ with clear and self-evident forms of power, self-mastery or overcoming (Belk, 1988: 150). These views would suggest the consumer’s capacity to become the Overhuman is entirely plausible amongst those who accept and believe in the principle of consumer sovereignty and the primacy of markets as a means to achieve authentic self-determination. However, for Nietzsche, even the most ambitious consumer identity project – the most cheerful, imaginative, or pioneering – would not match with the rubric of the Overhuman as it fails to overcome the humanistic comfort zone of a commercial hegemony that, regardless of how we explain it, remains primarily orientated towards supplying pleasure, satisfaction, and belonging through a sophisticated tapestry of pre-existing sign-values and coordinated images (e.g. Cronin and Fitchett, 2021; Yeritsian, 2020).

Rather than simply not being conducive to the Overhuman however, we might see consumer culture as a kind of funhouse mirror that at least allows its subjects to each perceive themselves as the Overhuman. Over the next few sections, we conceptualise consumer culture as a dialectical space that simultaneously promotes humanistic values – choice, openness towards divergent experiences, extensive mobility, and freedom of expression – but also aristocratic ambitions by promising each individual that they can be superior to the majority by demonstrating their greater tastes through the aggressive, competitive accumulation of consumer items, narcissistic hedonism, and the cultivation of envy. In short, all consumers have the equal right to express themselves but, in doing so, are each promised that they are better than, and have overcome, their peers.

Market mutton dressed as ÜberLamb: Three archetypes of commodified self-overcoming

In précis, Nietzsche’s position is a dichotomy between the lasting human herd and the Overhumans yet to come. Adapting Nietzsche to today’s world, our proposal is that contemporary consumer culture hinges upon the market’s coordination of opportunities for the last human to masquerade as the Overhuman. Yet, as the analysis outlined in the previous section should show, any prospect of an obtainable, actually existing Overhumanity for the herd is a conceptual contradiction (see also Cronin and Fitchett, 2021). In the subsections that follow, we extract materials from consumer research and commentaries on consumer culture to outline three contemporaneous archetypes of this paradoxical figure who impersonates the Overhuman – the inhuman ‘BIG Zombie’, the transhuman ‘Cyborg’, and the all-too-human ‘Slacktivist’. Our reduction to these three archetypes is not meant to constitute an empirical survey of consumer culture but offers a method to expand and describe the operation of the discourse of the last human and the Overhuman in contemporary consumer culture. Here, we have taken inspiration from Nietzsche (2005 [1883]: 273) who himself provides eight archetypes of so-called ‘superior humans’ that his prophet Zarathustra encounters but ultimately is disappointed by (the two kings, retired pope, sorcerer, voluntary beggar, shadow, soothsayer, the conscientious in spirit, and the ugliest man). Like the modern consumer subject, these figures seek to position themselves as superior but cling to certain comforts, fears, and piety that undermine their potential to overcome their selfhood.

Though the three contemporary archetypes we identify are committed to and driven by a Nietzschean desire to overcome one’s herd mediocrity and ‘be better’, becoming so remains a prohibitively difficult task; so precarious and daunting that marketplace resources are enrolled as comforting alternatives, allowing the consumer to suspend herself in a kind of limbo – or antechamber – between lasting humanism and anti-humanism. First, in ‘BIG Zombie’, we explore how the search for status and qualification from others reduces one’s life-affirming experiences to little more than the unreflective, blindly desirous, and inhumanly predatory pursuit of more. Second, through the ‘Cyborg’, we explain how the desperation to extend one’s personal longevity (and fantasies of perpetual recovery) reflects a fearful and less courageous relationship with one’s humanity. Third, we reveal the ‘Slacktivist’, a figure who over identifies with and indulges in an orgy of excessive humanism and, from a position of relative comfort, craves personal absolution but without sincere intention of any meaningful sacrifice or commitment. The in-between antechamber that all three archetypes find themselves satisfactorily marooned is a point we return to later in our discussion.

‘BIG’ Zombie

One of the clearest archetypes of the last human masquerading as the Overhuman in today’s consumer culture can be seen in what sociologist Eugene Halton refers to in upper-case parody as ‘BIG Zombie’ (Halton, 2008). For Halton, BIG Zombie is the subject who bears the full weight of consumer culture’s endless pseudo-Overhuman requirement to achieve a more authentic, more rewarding, more sensorial, and greater existence. But since consumers are not free or willing to achieve this in truly original terms, if only because they are compelled to look to the market as the most legitimate source for all solutions and fantasies, the expectations for self-determination forever fold back on themselves as ‘BIGGER’ and more excessive massifying images supplied and provided for all who can afford them. Halton describes the logic as follows:

BIG Zombie can live in the fantasies of the BIG McMansion in the gated surveillance community, the BIG SUV, the BIG amount of mall-gotten gains, the BIG obese body from believing the “merit” system of overconsumption, and feel no responsibility to anything more than his or her BIG butt plunking down in all of this excess, increasingly insulated from the common life. (Halton, 2008: 9)

BIG Zombie is the subject who searches for self-realisation within the ever-inflated grandiosity and meritocracy of the marketplace, has exchanged ‘self-originated experience with rationally derived commodity forms’ (Halton, 2008: 2) and finds solace not in production but through ‘repetitive, pleasurable miniactivities’ (Halton, 2008: 3). Cults of status, money, and symbols of triumph act as the centrifuge that mobilises and excites BIG Zombie and ultimately institute an other-directed rather than inner-directed search for qualification. This jars with Nietzsche’s (1998 [1886]: 154) advice that ‘[t]he noble type of person feels himself as determining value – he does not need approval’. The quest for objects and experiences to signal status, regardless of the struggle involved in obtaining them, falls short of Nietzsche’s vision of the Overhuman who has no need for affirmation and seeks only to ‘fly further and higher than all men of affirmation – he throws away much that would encumber his flight, including not a little that he esteems and likes; he sacrifices it to his desire for the heights’ (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887]: 100).

In the marketing literature, we regularly see glimpses of BIG Zombie in accounts of spectacular consumption environments that ostensibly emphasise transcendence, liberation from the mundane, and the triumph of emotion over rationalism – all things Nietzsche celebrated. But on critical inspection, most of these market-coordinated sites reflect a conquest of societally produced goals and the subordination of individual creativity to universal comforts and commodity-craving sameness through structured, easily appreciable ‘performances’ of play and sociality (Kozinets, 2002). It is perhaps true that BIG Zombie exudes some self-confidence and cheerfulness of Nietzsche’s Overhuman, but he or she denies the potential for overcoming and discontent needed for transcendence. A useful example can be found in the ethnographic notes of Kozinets and his co-authors when engaging with the major entertainment and dining complex, the ESPN Zone Chicago:

I feel like I’m stepping into a giant TV screen. Instead of actively “sucking out the marrow of life,” I feel that I’m being sucked into a black hole, where everything just turns and turns around me. An inferno of darkness, television, noise, games, food—and people. We are given no reason to go anywhere else: “Eat. Drink. Watch. Play. What more do you need?” (Kozinets et al., 2004: 662)

The emphasis here on ‘what more do you need?’ illustrates the level of languid completeness, complacency, and contentment that haunts BIG Zombie. Though the experience of a space like the ESPN Zone may appear interactive and participative, under this façade is the expectation to follow the rules and enjoy as one is expected to. In Nietzschean fashion, BIG Zombie is the last human in that he or she is last to contribute anything and is motivated to simply take it all in. These contours of passive pleasures, being looked after, and resigning oneself to spectator behind a fascia of interaction can also be seen in the infantilisation of adult patrons at the major play zones of the Las Vegas casino circuit, as illustrated by Belk in one his ethnographic observations:

One of my first impressions in being back in the casinos is that people wandering from slot machine to slot machine with their cups full of coins are much like children browsing in a candy store with their coins clasped hotly in their hands. Those who are dressed in sweat suits further reinforce this image by taking on the look of children in their pyjamas. They may not be quite as wide-eyed as children, but there is a hopeful anticipation that happiness is a purchase or handle pull away. (Belk, 2000: 115)

Rather than enabling a courageous, self-sufficient, and resilient human agent, the market relentlessly promotes a culture of infantile dependency on products, services, experiences, and money itself which enable consumers to enjoy without effort. The play zones of consumer culture do not protect autonomy or authenticity. Rather, they are paddocks for BIG Zombie to be predictably herded and controlled (sometimes with algorithmic certainty, see Hoang et al., 2023) by market technocrats who in turn are controlled by capitalist elites who are slaves to what Nietzsche (2005 [1883]: 176) derides as ‘“shopkeepers” gold’.

BIG Zombie is found wherever there is reliance on and acceptance of market-coordinated imagery, values, and experiences for the purposes of status, amusement, excitement, or entertainment, whether these be brand stores (Stevens et al., 2019), game shows (Fitchett, 2004), or video games (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2010). One only needs to imagine the stereotype of the console gamer strenuously rampaging through the desert with his carefully constructed avatar commando, heavily armed and perfectly conditioned, all from the comfort of his couch while munching chips and slurping soda (Cronin et al., 2014). BIG Zombie can at last save (or destroy) the world, overcome and slay his enemies in daring combat, achieve great sporting accomplishments over and over again and all with the tap of his fingers on the gamepad. More often than not, even in situations where BIG Zombie ditches the gamepad to physically, rather than vicariously, engage in painful, real-world adventure challenges (see Scott et al., 2017), this is still only the last human masquerading as the Overhuman. As Scott and colleagues suggest in relation to the Tough Mudder adventure challenge:

Tough Mudder is designed to have a clear plot, evoked in the key question addressed to potential participants: “Are you tough enough for Tough Mudder?” [….] Tough Mudder does not allow participants to reach a new status in society, although the organization does help participants signal that they have completed more than one Tough Mudder by bestowing different colored headbands. Instead, Tough Mudder participants are buying into a process of self-renewal. (Scott et al., 2017: 31)

The method to overcoming pain and leading a life-affirming existence through market-coordinated events like Tough Mudder are dramatically structured and scripted according to preconceived and popularly held – ‘BIG’ – views of what adventure is. Whether it is the fruits of mall-gotten gains, a fistful of casino wins, a place on a leaderboard, or a collection of coloured headbands, the symbols of greatness are more important to BIG Zombie than greatness itself.

The Cyborg

Another contemporary archetype of the last human concealing itself under the façade of the Overhuman is the Cyborg figure, a subject who is augmented and improved, though not necessarily transformed, by biotechnological and digital amenities. ‘Cyborgs’, for Belk (2022: 430), ‘are machine-like humans’, but, more existentially, reflect ‘a perennial sense of unfinishedness’ (Botez et al., 2020: 1395). The most palpable examples of the Cyborg can be found in the realm of body-hacking whereby consumer bodies are integrated with mechanical implants, enhancements, or prostheses to bring about very literal human-technology symbionts. Elsewhere, we see less dramatic amalgams of humans and machines in accounts of ‘digital consumption and the extended self’ (Belk, 2014), the ‘datapreneurial consumer’ (DuFault and Schouten, 2018), the ‘quantified self movement’ (Bode and Kristensen, 2016), and ‘heteromation’ (Dholakia and Firat, 2019). We find the Cyborg at the ‘hybrid spaces’ of the marketplace in which the physical and the digital coalesce, and in the overarching transhumanist ideology that underpins them (Belk, 2022).

Transhumanism, a term signalling ‘transitional humans’ who are in the process of moving beyond their corporeal limits, might very well sound like the Nietzschean Overhuman at least in spirit, but it falls short in a number of critical respects. Unlike Nietzschean anti-humanism, transhumanism is an extension or radicalisation of, rather than reaction against, humanism. Transhumanism is flagrantly anchored to human anxieties and a naïve optimism that invites deference to human technocracy. Rather than necessitating that one creatively solves one’s own problems or cheerfully embraces personal hardship or handicap, deterministic technologies become an interpassive medium that individuals can delegate the mastering of their problems and shortcomings to (Cronin and Fitchett, 2021). From a Nietzschean perspective, the transhumanist effort to expand selfhood beyond the limits and adversities imposed by finite bodies and minds through purchasing artificial intelligence or technological assistance/monitoring products, serves only to remove challenges thereby cancelling the needs to struggle and overcome which are crucial to the Overhuman:

If you want to rise high, then use your own legs! Do not let yourselves be carried up, nor sit upon the backs and heads of others! But did you mount a horse? Do you now ride swiftly up toward your goal? Very well, my friend! But your lame foot is sitting on the horse too! When you reach your goal, when you jump down from your horse: precisely at your height, you superior human– will you stumble! (Nietzsche, 2005 [1883]: 254)

The ‘horse’ that Nietzsche speaks of here is symbolic of some artificial advantage – a tool – drafted in to help a person travel further and overcome the limits of her lame foot. Without the horse, he suggests, the person is no better than before. Most Cyborgian efforts centre on extending human life or making it easier, improving personal health, or even achieving some kind of immortality – what Nietzsche considers to be an all-too-human ‘instinct for self-recovery’ (Nietzsche, 2007 [1908]: 9). Nietzsche’s Overhuman is not guided by incremental physical, biological, or neurological enhancements that are intended to ease, improve, or make the body more efficient, but in living one’s limited life as best as one might. Technologies like health-tracking devices function less as a source of empowerment but as a superego injunction that instructs individuals with absolute quantitative certainty on what they should or should not do more of, dispelling the need for creativity, self-sufficiency, and self-reliance. This is reflected aptly by one of Bode and Kristensen’s (2016) informants in their ethnographic engagement with the quantified self community:

I see that in order to have a progressive life, where you are constantly moving, this [self-tracking] is the way that I as a human being can do it. Of course I can sit down for instance New Year’s evening and think what do I need to change next year? However I do not get anywhere if it is not something concrete that it is quantifiable. I am more interested in goal [sic], rules, frames and consequences than tracking. It is just a tool. (“Axel” quoted in Bode and Kristensen, 2016: 128)

There are a number of tell-tale signs that Overhuman-like desires are present but somewhat diluted by and conflated with the logic of the last human here. First, in terms of this subject’s desire ‘to have a progressive life’, Nietzsche clarifies that the popular desire for progress is more often than not an optimistic longing for a world without fear and struggle, a master narrative that regulates herd morality. In contrast, the overcoming he advocates for aims ‘to respect everything that is severe and harsh’ (Nietzsche, 1998 [1886]: 154). Second, the subject’s awareness that technology is perhaps the most viable way that ‘I as a human being can do it’ is, in a Nietzschean sense, different to the Overhuman’s resolve since it denotes a commitment to one’s humanity. By aspiring to integrate and consume technology to augment oneself rather than independently finding ways to transcend oneself, the consumer remains the work of art rather than the artist (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887]). Third, the self-tracker’s faith in ‘something concrete’ or ‘quantifiable’ indicates what Nietzsche would consider to be the last human’s overestimation of truth in science and technological rationalism.

Material technoscience in its pursuit of empirical facts and quantification extinguishes all radical possibilities – ‘shattering and dissolving all firmly held belief’ – including belief in the Overhuman itself (Nietzsche, 1997 [1873–76]: 148). By increasing consumers’ morbid awareness of their calorie intake, rate of heartbeat, biological limits, and general closeness to death, digital self-tracking blunts the self-assurance of the Overhuman. As Nietzsche (2007 [1908]: 9) suggests, ‘[a] typically morbid being cannot become healthy, still less make itself healthy’. Nietzsche called for a non-resentful relationship to mortality and proclaimed that the way to the Overhuman requires internalising the most difficult truth, namely, that living the most well-lived life is one that will likely put us in an early grave. For him, the struggle for greatness should come with full realisation of the limits of our mortality and willing acceptance of death. Accordingly, the consumer who invests in market offerings and enhancements to offset one’s anxieties about death or deny one’s limitations functions more as the last human play-acting as the Overhuman rather than truly becoming the Overhuman. Just as desire can never be truly met through the marketplace nor mortality ever overcome, the ‘[C]yborg [remains] an unfinished emergence that comes to both occupy and constitute the market’ (Botez et al., 2020: 1400).

The Slacktivist

The third archetype of the last human impersonating the Overhuman can be found in the Slacktivist, the subject of market-liberal society who recognises that something is wrong with the world and desires to overcome it, but is deadlocked by lack of willingness to devote significant effort to bring about change in any meaningful way (Kristofferson et al., 2014). Rather than engage in novel, critical, and active problem-solving to mobilise alternatives, the Slacktivist seeks to entertain the idea of change with as little personal commitment or sacrifice as possible. Through what Bradshaw and Zwick (2016: 268) call ‘corporate lifestyle environmentalism’, one can quite easily make a commitment to helping to tackle climate change and averting environmental catastrophe simply by choosing Fairtrade coffee, buying organic chocolate, using one less plastic carrier bag, or driving a hybrid sedan. The Slacktivist might well be aware of the exploitative relations that consumption perpetuates yet will continue to consume because one can now do so in a manner that enables her to hold onto belief in the merit of personal consumer choices without needing to engage in less comfortable and all-around more radical reappraisals of the capitalist system (Cronin and Fitchett, 2021).

In their treatment of ethical brand consumption, Walz et al. (2014) argue that consumers experience pleasure from the act of choosing ostensibly ethical options in the marketplace rather than from any kind of subsequent verification of ethical improvement. In line with the last human’s desire for ease and convenience above hard work, Walz et al. suggest, ‘ethical brands offer the individual a momentary interpassive escape from the obligation to be a responsible consuming subject’ (p. 59). Such thinking resonates with the emergence of ‘consumer counter-mythologies’ where consumers do not have to give up hope on market systems when they offend their morals or values but are given the opportunity to gravitate towards rival consumptionscapes with their own competing products, brands, and self-proclaimed experts (Kristensen et al., 2011). A consumer counter-mythology does not offer a clean break from ‘market logic’ per se, Kristensen et al. (2011: 212) suggest, ‘but establishes an alternative form of market logic and remains heavily inscribed in consumption practices’. For Nietzsche however, the Overhuman must always be conscious that ‘where the market-place begins, there also begins the noise of the great play-actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies’ (Nietzsche, 2005 [1883]: 45). We can take from these words a warning that any courageous or creative acts that take place within the remit of market exchange are prone to the influence and interference of charlatans and opportunists who only ‘act’ as though they are for society’s best interests.

Even in cases where the market currently does not offer either a counter-mythology to help moralise a subject’s consumption choices or an ethical brand that all of one’s moral responsibilities can be delegated to, the necessary action required to correct the absence often requires little more than further kinds of consumption, such as buying into mediatised representations of protest. This ‘commodity activism’ centres on a value judgement that commodifiable entities such as internet culture and other consumer media are the only realistic fora through which ethical demands can be made. In their analysis of celebrity-fronted cause campaigns, Hopkinson and Cronin (2015) describe how sustainability-centred TV docu-series allied with online petitions are enrolled and marketised to encourage ‘mainstream malcontent’ for eminently solvable marketplace issues. The authors discuss the ‘noninvasive particularity’ of mass-mediated campaigns characterised by ‘the lack of burden or obligation’ placed on consumers who are ‘simply encouraged to voice their outrage from the comfort of their sofas through popular social media applications’ (Hopkinson and Cronin, 2015: 1396). Such non-committal acts are corrective rather than revolutionary. Rather than inviting audiences to rise up and overcome marketplace structures through direct action, consumers’ malcontent is channelled to ‘redeem as opposed to resist’ market values (2015: 1391). Social media, as a platform to share malcontent, is leveraged as a ‘progressive’ rather than subversive tool that requires little individual courage or responsibility. As Nietzsche (1968 [1901]: 382) suggests, ‘Multiplicities are invented in order to do things for which the individual lacks the courage’.

In addition to ethical consumption choices, consumption counter-mythologies, and mediatised representations of protest, another resolve of the Slacktivist is the boycott which, like the others, occurs within rather than outside of hegemonic ideological coordinates (i.e. market logic). Boycotts do not require anything greater from the Slacktivist than a mild sacrifice as a consumer. While genuinely revolutionary, radical acts require significant expense – possibly necessitating the breaking of laws, morals, and personal security – to undermine dominant relations, boycotting is a legal, moral consumer choice to forego a product or brand that remains not only tolerated but often readily supported by the media, NGOs, consumer watchdogs, politicians, and celebrities. Naomi Klein detected this when she registered awareness of the shortcomings of ‘glorified ethical shopping guides: how-to’s on saving the world through boycotts and personal lifestyle choices’ (2010: 428) and the tendency toward bourgeois tribalism akin to ‘a tie-dyed college town like Berkeley boycotting everything but hemp paper and Bridgehead coffee’ (2010: 413). Even if a boycott is successful in encouraging a particular brand or organisation to do something different, it will not radically alter global capitalism. Consumers can combine boycotts with more confrontational and personally involved – or what Cambefort and Roux (2019: 580) call ‘extreme’ – acts, though these risk remaining at either a proximal level such as ‘sticking campaign messages on products or shop floors’ or descending to the level of farce such as ‘abseiling into a firm’s general meeting or climbing up a crane’. Extreme acts clearly graduate beyond the realm of Slacktivism but, if motivated by virtue-signalling or a conceited desire for recognition, risk perpetuating rather than undermining capitalism’s economy of spectacles and politics of individual demand.

The Slacktivist as an archetype of commodified self-overcoming can be summarised as the subject who possesses the Overhuman’s discontent but lacks the courage, creativity, and flexibility needed to challenge and denaturalise the overarching market logic and values that determine the status quo. For the Slacktivist, it is simply obvious that everything in society, including the areas that most need change and improvement should be tackled through the market. It is worth noting that critical marketing scholars too, including those writing this paper, perilously orbit subjectification as the Slacktivist. When we in marketing scholarship write under the aegis of criticality, we seek ideas that can intervene in public and intellectual discourses that might denaturalise what is taken-for-granted. But usually, and pragmatically, these ideas are written only up to the event horizon of ‘relevancy’ to the topics of consumption, markets, and marketing with a restricted readership in mind. Furthermore, critical marketing scholarship is often produced within academic milieu from positions of relative comfort protected from precarity by salaries, pensions, and cultural capital. While these protections are arguably under threat at the present time, ¹ we critical marketing theorists should not be immune to criticism for our ‘refusal to recognise the reality of a traumatic perception’ (Bradshaw and Zwick, 2016: 271): thinking ourselves above the herd of managerialist career researchers through our import of radical philosophical concepts and acting as if doing so is anything more than simply commodifying these ideas for consumption by fellow literati. Presenting and publishing one’s theoretical conclusions amongst peers remains ‘a matter of pride and ornament’ for the critical scholar, and like the last human who seeks qualification from others, should be approached as fallible and subject to ‘some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear’ (Nietzsche, 1974 [1887]: 121).

Discussion: Enter ante-humanism

We have shown how the ideals of Nietzsche’s Overhuman in the contemporary marketplace reflect and underpin the ostensible ambitions and will of the last humans, creating a strange middle ground. The lures and desires of consumer culture are predicated on a paradoxical ability to commodify the Overhuman for mass consumption, and for consumers to be capable of believing and acting as if self-overcoming was in some sense possible to achieve through the market, whether through the symbols of success for BIG Zombie, the techno-possibilities of enhancement for the Cyborg, or media-based virtue-signalling for the Slacktivist. In the case of all three archetypes, overcoming is not won for oneself but is supplied by others. The market leases out a space for creativity and passion, but that space remains demarcated by social determinism and herd conformity resulting in little more than diversified choices within, or complementary to, dominant values of consumer culture. While such a result may first appear to be a cop-out, a reiteration of the now commonly accepted view that consumers cannot in fact escape the market (Kozinets, 2002), taking up Nietzsche’s philosophical project can offer new insights here.

First, our work provides a detailed clarification of ‘how consumption might only provide illusions of transformation’ (Ahlberg et al., 2022: 669), a view that has spawned a pessimistic theoretical attitude crystallised by Terminal Marketing (TM). To write terminally in marketing scholarship requires a willingness to conceptualise subjectivity in ways that move beyond the hopefulness of transformative operations of marketing, to reject neat off-the-peg ontologies of the subject, and embrace the problems of human-material interaction, no matter how messy or depressing. Although Ahlberg et al. (2022: 678) frame TM as ‘seek[ing] recourse in the realism of our calamity and looks for interventions in the docility of contemporary capitalist subjectivation’, Coffin and Egan-Wyer (2022) and Hoang et al. (2023) clarify that the focus of TM’s critique extends beyond capitalism into broader problems of the human condition. This is where Nietzsche can contribute incisively. Nietzsche enables us to diagnose the consumer with an all-too-human willingness to push aside uncomfortable truths, a perspective which contrasts sharply with ‘the celebratory view’ of the consumer as an autonomous, self-assured agent in earlier marketing scholarship (Hoang et al., 2023: 3). Rather than emphasise some instrumental and optimistic result for individuals and groups happily improving themselves through the market, a Nietzschean perspective reveals a Sisyphean deadlock for humans who cynically collude as consumers and marketers in illusions that protect their ease and comfort, calling for equality and recognition while rarely inconveniencing themselves to strive for a higher, more just world. We argue that the dialectical poles of the last human and the Overhuman are intentionally obfuscated and conflated by consumers and marketers alike, maintaining commodifiable and illusory forms of self-overcoming that allow subjects to suspend themselves in an antechamber between the lingering humanism of the past and anti-humanism of future possibilities. Rather than suffer willingly and independently in an anti-humanist pursuit of becoming something greater, purchasable enactments of self-overcoming allow consumers’ visions of greatness to calcify, become circumscribed, and sold back to them in ever-massified possibilities.

Second, the antechamber we identify within consumer culture contrasts with critical positions in marketing theory that assume social problems emerge from differences in power and contradictory interests between market actors and consumers (see Murray and Ozanne, 1991). ‘Having identified a contradiction’, Murray and Ozanne (1991: 138) suggest, ‘the theorist must envision new unconstraining social conditions and try to bring them into existence through political action’. The problem that marketing theorists recognise when adopting a Nietzschean lens, however, is that there is rarely a clear ‘contradiction’ between market actors’ and consumers’ interests; the status quo remains perpetuated through the shared and cynical pragmatism of both. The market caters to and purports to address the fundamental anxieties of the self, meeting consumers’ demands to ‘feel’ superior and negating any need for a political path out of their insecurity. Consumers’ fantasies to overcome their herd mediocrity might not by themselves signal a fully conscious affirmation of capitalism but when these fantasies are understood to be most conveniently, credibly, and practically realised through the market, the inclination for alternative political solutions is nonetheless stalled. No genuine overcoming of the self or any of its humanist baggage is ever realistically achieved through consumption yet the market remains relied upon out of the last human’s base instrumentalism and inertia. In reflection of TM’s axiological agenda, this deadlock we report on is ‘characterized by a lack of therapeutic resolutions’ (Ahlberg et al., 2022: 670) and, respecting the Nietzschean decree to resist the all-to-human desire to offer moralising solutions, we draw to a close by charting a more difficult path out of the antechamber we have articulated.

While some think of Nietzsche as a nihilist whose philosophy concludes with a kind of inert cynicism, Nietzschean critique is more forceful in its demand for change than much of the ‘optimistic utopianism’ that typically pervades even the critical contingents of marketing scholarship (Ahlberg et al., 2022: 670). By revealing people’s currently unfulfilled and distorted ambition to ‘overcome’ the self, Nietzschean philosophy might not translate to a coherent and applicable political project, but it does offer a penetrating, if pitilessly forthright, lens to expose the reality that holds humanity back from its improvement. Of course, whatever tragic realism that Nietzsche tries to confer on a market-reliant herd will inevitably conflict with the psychic conditions the herd already cling to and have been referred to collectively as ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009). Capitalism perpetuates itself through the therapeutic illusion that it represents not just the best but the only conceivable reality, whereas Nietzschean realism emphasises an entirely inverse logic that rejects all such universalism, contending that no single ‘way’ exists for all, and that a higher form of living is available only to those who restlessly create new values. Nietzschean realism is tragic because it reveals the doxic violence that is ossified through individuals’ and groups’ all-too-human instinct to pursue instrumental comforts and expressive interests rather than sacrifice these in pursuit of something higher. Accordingly, any intervention must contend with capitalist realism having on its side the more comforting fantasy: a simple and acquiescent political situation for which one can submit one’s labour, time, and even one’s life without needing to worry about opportunity costs – for no alternatives are believed to exist.

Our conclusion is that, in acquiescing to the capitalist ‘way’, the subjects of consumer culture resign themselves to the antechamber between humanism and anti-humanism, moving beyond the former but not becoming one with the ever-retreating frontier of the latter. In this sense, archetypes such as BIG Zombie, the Cyborg, or the Slacktivist may best be described as ante-humanist, a subjectivity that rejects humanist ideas and ideals in principle yet reproduces them in practice for the securities and comforts they present. Ante-humanism, as we conceptualise it in this ‘antechamberal’ sense, is especially stagnating for individual and social change because it claims to represent transcendence while perpetuating the cynical capitalist realism that obviates any urgency to imagine something better. Recognising that when given the choice, humans will happily remain within an antechamber of personal comfort rather than risk themselves in solidarity for some greater good tells analyst-activists that straightforward leftist critiques of political economy, and solutions based on traditional collectivist politics, are not enough to catalyse durable change.

More pluralistic theorising is needed if capitalist realism and the ante-humanism it engenders are to be overcome in any kind of substantive way for the twenty-first century. Speculative solutions might be found in Fisher’s (2018) unfinished ‘acid-communism’ thesis. Fisher outlines a radical departure from twentieth century actually existing socialism and identifies instead the vision of a quasi-Nietzschean ‘new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving’ (2018: 687) and ‘a new existential atmosphere, which [rejects] both drudgery and traditional resentments’ (2018: 689). Fisher identifies acid communism in the avant-garde vitalism that mobilised movements throughout the psychedelic 1960s–1970s – like the Paris ‘68 rebellion – which emphasised creativity outside of waged work and new bohemian values counter to the prejudices and taken-for-granted maxims of the bourgeoisie. In recognising Nietzsche’s critique of the mediocrity and downward-levelling effects of liberal-democracy, acid communism, as Fisher conceives of it, differs from traditional leftist emphases on materialism, collectivism, and inclusivity (often relative only to work and production), and centres instead on radical aesthetic liberation from massifying strictures that hinder creativity. Acid communism, in its spirited mission to overcome economic drudgery, generic alienations, and collective shibboleths that suppress unrestrained action and expression, is different from any grey central planning of Soviet bloc socialism but also from the stifling moralism of today’s liberal left. Reimagining avant-garde projects such as acid communism allows analyst-activists to move beyond standard ‘social critiques’ of capitalism limited to contesting social inequality and emphasising material egalitarianism. Instead, acid communism provides what Yeritsian (2020: 212) calls a more Nietzsche-appropriate ‘artistic critique’ that challenges the slave-moralising machineries of rationalisation and utilitarianism that engender malaise, limit creativity, and sustain acquiescence to the comforts of conformism and other humanist traps.

In moving from social critique to artistic critique in marketing theory, we may follow Botez et al. (2020) who caution that even supposedly posthuman innovations in theory and practice are not immune to humanist impulses, as exemplified in certain similarities between Christian dogma and scholarly approaches that attempt to move away from human-centricity. Like Nietzsche who famously took umbrage with what he saw as the lingering presence of Christianity’s herd morality in modernity’s political ideologies, whether liberalism, socialism, or so on, Botez et al. (2020) remain suspicious of any posthuman movement’s claims to transcend human foibles like religiosity while in fact retaining and repackaging Christian values and morals to prefigure its own authoritarian hegemony. Nietzsche can assist in reminding TM theorists that the posthuman may not be anti-human enough, challenging us to reject those half-way ante-humanist subjectivities that merely claim to create new values while rebranding the old. Decentring not just the subject but how we come to think about subjectivity is perhaps not an overly radical proposal when we consider how it is creeping into critical marketing thought elsewhere. For example, Arnould’s (2022) consideration of epistemologies that trade out humanism for more sustainable and eco-centric ordering relations provides a useful snapshot of where Nietzschean critique might contribute. Along these lines, an opportunity for future research might be to invoke Nietzsche in examining why the hypocrisy and untruths of humanism and ante-humanism are not only more than visible in consumer culture but are frequently disavowed to allow for perpetuation of the anthropocentric domination of nature.